You may have already heard plenty about Call Me By Your Name, the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film. There’s original music by Sufjan Stevens, Oscar buzz, and even some (misplaced) controversy. But you may have missed that this film is not only a queer coming-of-age romance— it’s a Jewish one.

Call Me By Your Name is based on a 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman about Elio, a teenager in Italy in the 1980s who falls for Oliver, a young academic who comes to stay with his family over the summer. Both the family and guest are Jews, a minority in a very Catholic country.

This shared bond is one of the things that brings Elio and Oliver together; Elio is enchanted by how Oliver wears his Jewishness on his sleeve (or literally, on his chest, in the form of a Magen David), and he tries to emulate him, despite the fact that his family describes themselves as “Jews of discretion.” Elio even wears his own Star of David (“My Star of David, his Star of David, our two necks like one, two cut Jewish men joined together from time immemorial,” writes Aciman in the original novel). In the novel, at least, this has a mixed effect for Elio:

Judaism never troubled [Oliver] the way it troubled me, nor was it the subject of an abiding, metaphysical discomfort with himself and the world. It did not even harbor the mystical, unspoken promise of redemptive brotherhood. And perhaps this was why he wasn’t ill at ease with being Jewish and didn’t constantly have to pick at it, the way children pick at scabs they wish would go away. He was okay with being Jewish.

In the novel, despite his secularity, Elio understands his own sexuality through the lens of Jewishness:

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Clean Jewish, Oliver Jewish— we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal.

How Aciman writes Jewish characters is reminiscent of his personal essays about Jewishness; he treats the subjects with ambivalence and great poignancy. Aciman was born to a Jewish Egyptian family, living as a tiny minority until the family was forced to leave when the writer was a teenager.

As far as the film is concerned, much of the cast is Jewish as well. Armie Hammer, of Jewish descent, plays Oliver, and Jewish-American newcomer Timothée Chalamet plays Elio. Elio’s father is played by Michael Stuhlbarg of A Serious Man.

It’s exciting that an Oscar film for this season is also a Jewish queer one. The movie doesn’t come out in wide release till November, but you can enjoy the decadently Sufjan Stevens-laden trailer in the meantime (see if you can spot the Jewish star necklace):

Image via YouTube

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Imagine a bunch of angry Jewish men in the same place, at the same time. Is it a daily morning minyan at a dying Conservative synagogue? Or is it a Noah Baumbach film? Yep, it’s the second one. The trailer is just out for The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), the writer-director’s latest project, fresh off of Cannes.

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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The National Museum of American Jewish History hosts a residency program called OPEN for Interpretation that invites a diverse array of artists and thinkers to contribute their perspectives on the Jewish American experience. Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain and UC Berkeley artist and robotics professor Ken Goldberg are the current artists, and last night they premiered their short film, The Whole Cinemagillah, their best effort to capture Judaism in America as shown in film and television over the course of the past century. Clip ideas and submissions were – and still are – welcome for this truly collaborative project. Jewcy had the chance to speak with Shlain and Goldberg as they prepared for the big night.

Jewcy: How did you become involved with OPEN for Interpretation and the National Museum of American Jewish History?

Shlain: I met Josh Perelman [Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions & Collections at the museum] at the Future of Storytelling conference a few years ago, and he asked us to do this artist-in-residency program. We did a film together ten years ago called The Tribe that explores the American Jewish experience through the history of the Barbie Doll. We came to the museum and saw an exhibit about the history of Jews in film and TV and Vaudeville, and we knew we wanted to work on this.

Goldberg: The museum is new and elegant. It’s chronological on multiple floors tracing the letter from George Washington to modern times. OPEN for Interpretation invites artists in from outside to provide some sort of response – cabaret to photograph to anything else – that engages with their exhibit to open it up for new interpretations.

Jewcy: Had you seen other films or books that covered this topic?

Shlain: When we first came up with the idea to do it, we found so many articles and a couple books, but nothing like a montage all together of most of the clips that we thought would be very compelling to see. So much written, but not visualized.

Goldberg: We found a lot of great clips of these Jewish moments but hadn’t found anyone who had put them together.

Shlain: There was no comprehensive list. There were plenty of lists like The 10 Best Jewish Moments in TV, but not one exhaustive list.

Goldberg: We were very conscious that for a lot of young people, the digital generation, their attention span is geared around something that only lasts about 10 minutes. We wanted to make something compact to get conversation started.

Shlain: There was something powerful about the way the way Jews are represented and represent themselves in this 12-minute gestalt. We wanted the whole pastiche, the evolution of representation.

Jewcy: What was the most surprising clip you received?

Shlain: The clip of Frank Sinatra from The House I Live In. Towards the end of making it, someone found this clip from his movie about anti-Semitism which I just didn’t expect to exist.

Goldberg: I had never seen The Believer with Ryan Gosling. Looking back, I found that to be incredibly riveting and powerful.

Jewcy: Were you pleased with all of the clips and recommendations you received, or were you hoping to find something more?

Shlain: As a woman, I found most of the woman characters very stereotyped, whereas the men were very nuanced. In the end, it couldn’t be 50/50 screen time – there was so much more for men. This is an evolving project. There is a booth at the museum where people can add their own favorite moments, and a Facebook where we’ve gotten over 20,000 people participating. We hope to add to this and make a new version.

Goldberg: We didn’t want to have a bias, or come at this with an axe to grind. It’s actually a really complex tapestry that’s opened up a lot in the past 20 years.

Shlain: The first film we showed is from the 1920s. It’s interesting to see how much we’ve revealed of our true selves in the past 100 years. Back then, it was very veiled and hidden. Seeing that evolution is very interesting.

Goldberg: In 2012, the book The New Jew in Film talks about a “Jew-aissance.” It’s a perspective on the stereotype. We get both irritated and insider pleasure from the stereotype – we can reclaim it.

Shlain: It’s like how Jews can tell jokes about Jews, but others can’t.

Jewcy: What is your favorite clip, and why?

Shlain: that’s like asking for a favorite child. I will never forget seeing Private Benjamin when he lists all of the 10-15 things about him that are very Jewish and then says, “I’m Jewish.” Then in the next scene they’re having sex.

Goldberg: The Believer was originally very long as part of the film, now it’s not even in there. He does a prayer and then goes into an amazing monologue, but as the film got shorter and shorter, it didn’t fit.

Shlain: We loved it so much it didn’t even make it into the movie! The more we cut down the clip, the less it was contextualized. We couldn’t do it justice unless we spent three minutes on it.

Jewcy: What’s next?

Shlain: We’re excited to start entering it into film festivals. We had a lot of fun with that when we did The Tribe. In terms of film, that’s a good question. We’re taking a nice break. I just had another film come out a month ago called 50/50: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Women + Power that explores the history of women in power.

Goldberg: On Sunday, I’m hosting 200 people for a robotics conference. [laughs]

Jewcy: Is there anything else you would like Jewcy readers to know?

Shlain: Our film website has all the info on it. You can’t watch the movie on it, but it’s a call for entries. To watch the movie, come to the museum! Soon, we’ll have other plans to share.

Learn more about the film’s premiere at NMAJH.

Image via Facebook.

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Sal, directed by James Franco, is almost here. The film tells the story of the end of Sal Mineo’s life. Mineo, who famously played John “Plato” Crawford in Rebel Without A Cause, was stabbed and killed when he was just 37 years old. He was one of the first stars to openly announce his homosexuality.

Franco has a smaller role in the film as director Milton Katselas.Sal comes out on November 1 in limited theaters. Based on this short trailer, we can’t wait to see it.

(Photo by aphrodite-in-nyc/wikimedia)

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The wildly talented Natalie Portman is featured on the cover of the Elle UK November issue. Besides looking predictably gorgeous, she’s also provided us with quotable lines, giving us—and our boyfriends—even more reason to love her. Interviewed by her Thor: The Dark World costar, Tom Hiddleston, Portman discussed feminism, love, and most importantly, Dirty Dancing. Elle UK reports:

On love:

‘I see it a lot – this romantic view of the world where you fall in and out of love on a whim. It ignores the depth of trying to know another human being and respect them and love them, and puts in its place the excitement of an immediate intimacy. But really knowing some? That is such an opportunity.’

On feminism:

‘I want every version of a woman and a man to be possible. I want women and men to be able to be full-time parents or full-time working people or any combination of the two. I want both to be able to do whatever they want sexually without being called names. I want them to be allowed to be weak and strong and happy and sad – human, basically. The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a “feminist” story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho. A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathise with.’

And, save the best for last, on Dirty Dancing:

‘To this day, it’s the movie that I’ve seen most in my life. “I carried a watermelon”… I can’t talk about it too much, or I’ll start getting teary. There are other movies I love, but no other movie that I have watched over and over.’

Do we smell a remake with Portman? Dirty Dancing: Jerusalem Nights. OK, fine. That’s pretty unnecessary. But, we would all go see it… just saying.

(Still image from Elle UK)

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